ALICIA PILLER
ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURES
January 29 to March 12, 2022
INSTALLATION VIEWS
For inquiries, please contact info@track16.com
Track 16 presents Los Angeles-based artist Alicia Piller in her solo exhibition, Atmospheric Pressures. This material exploration is a poetic look at our obsessive need to check news, both the weather forecast and shifting political climates, in an attempt to establish some level of control over the future. Raw materials, curated objects, and news clippings fuse together to capture the unpredictable energy of the Western world. Sculptural works become a part of a fragmented mirror, capturing the convergence of environmental and societal disintegration, while simultaneously allowing this space created for uncertainty to become a catalyst forward, a glimpse into landscapes of growth, hope, new weather, new environments.
Included in the exhibition are 16 sculptural works that explore uncertainty amid disintegrating ecological and political systems. Organized into three categories: views from above ground, views looking out to the horizon, and views from above Earth, the works are multimedia assemblages that utilize materials such as vinyl, latex balloons, resin, gel medium, recycled screen printing ink on masking tape, palm trees, laser prints, geodes, Manjaadi Kuru seeds, glass beads, and plastics. Layers, texture, and repetition of the materials depict organic movement and shifting points of view.
In the section of the exhibit titled “views from above ground,” the piece ‘Warming Earth Plagued. Party Systems’ shows decay and starts off the ecological and biological narrative with materials that layer and cluster as printed mushrooms climb over old systems, rooted to a fallen palm frond. Moving to the section titled “views looking out to the horizon,” a work titled ‘Navigating, Outbreaks & Deep-Seated Divides’ sets us on a course of chaos. Undulating surfaces show movement through remnants of civilization with cracked mirrors, Covid virus, seeds, minerals. And finally, the section titled “views from above earth” includes ‘Hurricane Season. Exposing Roots, Breaching Infrastructure,’ which uses organic and twisted materials to depict a spiral cyclone energy that rips up the roots to all decaying systems. The stage is set for new growth.
The artist notes, “My enveloping sculptures and installations expand out, to actualize singular systems that feel equally familiar and foreign. The construction of each work becoming a biological unfolding of time that examines the energy around wounds left by historical traumas.”
ARTIST TALK
Alicia Piller and jill moniz
in conversation
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Los Angeles based artist, Alicia Piller was born and raised in Chicago and received her Bachelors in both Fine Arts (Painting) & Anthropology from Rutgers University in 2004. While working in the fashion industry; living a decade in NYC and three and a half years in Santa Fe, NM, Piller cultivated her distinctive sculptural voice. Continuing to expand her artistic practice, Alicia completed her MFA focused on sculpture and installation from Calarts in May of 2019.
As a method to locate the root of human histories, Alicia merges the new and discarded, experimenting with a wide range of materials to construct large scale works that mimic forms of cellular biology. Piller envisions historical traumas, both political and environmental, through the lens of a microscope. Piller’s mixed media practice is as much about materiality as it is about content. Attempting to reconcile questions about the current state of our times; she works on a macro/micro level, breathing life into materials that have been removed from their ‘natural’ environment. Manipulating things like resin and latex balloons (stemming from her background as a clown); each work becomes a biological unfolding of time, examining the energy around wounds societies have inflicted upon themselves and others.
Alicia’s work is a part of the Hammer Permanent Collection, Glendale College Collection, Forrest Kirk Collection, and the Pam Royalle Collection. Recent solo exhibitions include 2020 Visions, College of the Canyons, Valencia, CA (2021), Unearthed: Time Keeping Mound City, Craft Alliance, St. Louis, MO (2021), Spirit of the Times, L.R. Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2019), Birth of the Rac_es_ist, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA (2018). Her sculptural work was featured on the cover of Full Blede Magazine, Issue 10 (Fall 2019) and drawings of sculptural work in the Lumina Journal (Sarah Lawrence College) (Jan 2020).
EXHIBITION 360° TOUR
For inquiries, please contact info@track16.com.
Track 16 is open Wednesday through Saturday, 12 – 6pm.
No appointment necessary.
